Yahoo has high hopes for product revamps

Commentary: Mayer to keep working on Yahoo Mail, Flickr, others

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Wall Street is giving props to Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s turnaround efforts so far, along with plans for more product revamps in the vein of recent upgrades to Yahoo Mail and Flickr.

Earlier on Monday, Yahoo
YHOO, -2.00%
surpassed Wall Street’s expectations for the fourth quarter, fueling a bounce for the stock in after-hours trading, aided in part by gains in the company’s search-advertising revenue. Read; Yahoo’s Mayer beats again.

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Mayer talked about some of the work that has been going on at Yahoo since her arrival, including major upgrades for Yahoo Mail and Flickr, which included improved mobile apps.

“We’ve identified approximately a dozen or so applications that we need to work our way through, and you’re going to see each quarter we’re going to make releases in these areas to make those products more innovative and to redesign and revamp them,” she said. When asked for specifics from Wall Street analysts, Mayer declined to offer further details, but did acknowledge that the changes would come in the “big entry points into our system” — such as email, search and Yahoo’s home page.

She also noted that a few other areas targeted for improvements could include “vertical” products like finance, sports and news. “These are the types of things that we’re going to focus on,” Mayer added. “There’s a few others where we’ve got some growth, innovative ideas that we’re going to experiment with where they take us.”

Reuters

Marissa Mayer

What’s more, Mayer said experimentation was necessary in the still-nascent mobile sector, and she compared the early stages of figuring out how make money off mobile to the early days of search. She predicted that companies would figure it out — “it’s just we have to do a lot of experimentation.”

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